In Game of Thrones season four episode eight, The Mountain caused Prince Obyren’s head to explode after he dug his fingers into the Prince’s eye sockets and squeezed his skull with the rest of his massive hands. But according to two experts, that gruesome scenario is not biologically possible.

Cynthia Bir, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, told the Washington Post there was no way a head would explode by applying pressure from the eyes.

"You would need to create pressure inside the cranium. Even if you could generate pressure by squeezing the outside of the head, once the cranium is breached at the orifice where the eye nerves enter, this pressure would be greatly diminished."

Researcher Tobias Mattei, who has examined how children’s bicycle helmets prevent skull crush injuries agrees. "It would be impossible for even the strongest human to break the skull through compressive forces exerted by any means - either with their hands bilaterally or by stepping [on] it - in any portion of the skull," he told the US paper.

There is an urban legend about a chess player named Nikolai Titov whose head reportedly exploded when he was playing chess. But a quick fact check shows that this too is a fictional story, but in this case made up by parody tabloid newspaper Weekly World News in 1994.